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Raymond Chandler Gets a Star in Hollywood

June 27, 2014

Long-celebrated noir-author Raymond Chandler, former president of the Mystery Writers of America who penned The Big Sleep and six other novels, received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame (to be placed in 2015). The film version of The Big Sleep starred Humphrey Bogart as Chandler’s private detective protagonist Philip Marlowe—Lauren Bacall played the female lead. Other novelists to receive a star include Ray Bradbury and Dr. Seuss.

A film clip, shows Chandler in his lone film cameo in a scene from 1959’s Double Indemnity (he’s the guy sitting in a chair outside the office)—he was co-writer on the film with Billy Wilder, which netted an Oscar nomination for screenwriting. William Faulkner, famously, was a co-writer on the screenplay for The Big Sleep.

Chandler, who reportedly became a detective fiction writer at age 44 after the Great Depression led to the loss of his job as an oil company executive, died in 1959.